Australia’s great AI hope just hit a speed bump

October 6, 2026 — 6:15pm

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On one side of a beige building in the Canberra suburb of Hume, there’s the Big River Trade Centre selling building products and timber. On the other, the nation’s capital city bleeds into the bush.

But inside, there’s a factory making big, white, metal boxes to house and cool the cutting-edge AI chips powering the company touted as Australia’s next artificial intelligence champion: Firmus.

If the seven-year-old company’s listing on the ASX this month goes to plan, Firmus will be worth about $44 billion, just a fraction less than Woolworths.

To get there, Firmus is relying on the white boxes it calls “HyperCubes” – the basic building blocks of the ASX-bound company’s claim of “creating the most efficient AI infrastructure” that it will then contract to the likes of Meta to train or operate new AI models.

In truth, the cubes are more like rectangles, but Firmus has always known the power of good branding.........

© The Sydney Morning Herald